To make universal health coverage (UHC) truly universal we need an approach which places gender and power at the centre of our analysis. This means we need a discussion about who is included, how health is defined, what coverage entails and whether equity is ensured. To celebrate Universal Health Coverage Day RinGs has put together a list of ten arguments for why gender should be a central focus within UHC.

This briefing note reports baseline findings from a research project to understand the barriers disabled, older people and people living with a chronic illness face when accessing WASH in Zambia and Uganda.

Disabled people represent the largest socially excluded group and most live without access to basic sanitary services, which can exacerbate impairments and poverty. Nevertheless, they are often excluded from development intervention and research. In response, WaterAid in Ethiopia designed a pilot project in Butajira to meet the needs of disabled people within their service delivery work. Learning gained through the project informed WaterAid’s equity and inclusion approach.

Plan Indonesia’s water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) programme features the use of Community-led Total Sanitation (CLTS) and hygiene promotion projects in several districts in Indonesia. To contribute to universal access and to reach the most vulnerable people, Plan Indonesia seeks to continuously improve disability inclusive strategies within its WASH programme.

In this IDS Working Paper, Robert Chambers (CLTS Knowledge Hub, IDS) and Gregor von Medeazza (UNICEF) argue for a more inclusive framework for thinking about and dealing with undernutrition. One concept is FTIs (faecally-transmitted infections). This is designed to avoid the reductionisms of faecal-oral infections, waterborne diseases, and the focus on the diarrhoeas to the neglect of less dramatic and less measurable FTIs especially environmental enteropathy. A second concept is the 5 As – availability and access which both have oral associations, and absorption, antibodies and allopath

In this article, first published in the journal Social Development Issues, 36 (1), Terry A. Wolfer (University of South Carolina) makes the case for sanitation as an important issue for the social work profession and introduces CLTS as a preferred approach for addressing it.

The country is ostensibly in the throes of a great social movement for sanitation. Gandhi’s name is evoked, Prime Minister Narendra Modi leads from the front, ministers lift brooms for cameras, and officers, college and school children take oaths against littering and to clean their surroundings. Earlier the PM pledges in his Independence Day speech toilets for girls and boys in all schools.

After a few years researching and working on sanitation, I feel (felt) that I have a good knowledge about the topic, or at least good knowledge of most of it and a clear picture of the areas I should learn more about. Moreover as a shit-worker I –and probably most of us in the sector– have developed a sort of pride or even vanity about being a herald of a neglected cause...

Urban sanitation is becoming an emerging priority in the WASH sector, partly due to the realisation that it has not been given enough attention in the past. For one thing, because the Millennium Development Goals targeted sanitation coverage (people having access to latrines) and cities are doing much better than rural areas in this respect.